Richard Nunan

Professor

Richard Nunan (Ph.D. & M.A. in Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; B.A. in Mathematics, Vassar College)

In his own words

Professor of Philosophy, with affiliated faculty status in Women's and Gender Studies, Film Studies, and the Honors College at the College of Charleston. I've been affiliated with the College of Charleston since 1984, and served previously (six years) as department chair. I've also served a five-year term as editor of the American Philosophical Association's Newsletter on Philosophy and Law.

I have fairly broad teaching interests in political philosophy, applied ethics, philosophy of science, and history of philosophy. My main areas of research in recent years, however, have been in philosophy of law, philosophy and film, and philosophical issues concerning gender rights and gender identity questions.

Education

Ph.D., Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillB.A., Mathematics, Vassar College

An exploration of competing electoral systems-single-member district plurality systems (predominant in the U.S.) versus proportional representation systems (STV in particular)-and competing theories of participatory democracy: J.S. Mill's optimistic deliberative democracy model, and Richard Posner's more pessimistic elite democracy model. Mill assumes voters are politically educable, capable of making informed contributions to legislative processes through electoral action. Posner assumes voters are too narrowly self-interested to be substantively educable. Elections, consequently, serve merely as a crude form of quality control and smooth succession of political authority. It is argued that the latter theory is plausible only under single-member district plurality electoral systems like ours, so that the electoral system grounds the theory, not the other way around. Under a single transferable vote system (Mill's preferred system), in which voters' ordinal preferences among candidates govern the outcomes in multi-member districts, Mill's deliberative democracy model has a realistic prospect ofsuccess.

One important constraint on films qualifying as suitably philosophical has been Stephen Mulhall’s ground rule that films do not count as doing philosophy in their own right if they merely lend themselves to philosophical interpretation through external application of theories. “Specific theoretical edifices (originating elsewhere, in such domains as psychoanalysis or political theory),” sometimes treat the target film “only as a cultural product whose specific features served to illustrate the truth of that theory—as one more phenomenon the theory rendered comprehensible.” [Mulhall, On Film (2001), 6-7] Whenever that happens, the film itself does no philosophy. Tom Wartenberg has expanded our understanding of Mulhall’s constraint under a more explicit label: the imposition objection: “only creator-oriented interpretations of a film can justify the claim that the film itself is philosophical.” [Thinking on Screen (2007), 26] External appeals to philosophical (or psychological, historical, or political) theories are, in effect, audience-originated interpretations, ways of using films philosophically, but not uses that were originally intended by their creators. They are therefore in no sense components of the film, and the film is not thereby rendered philosophical with respect to its own content.

Both Wartenberg and Mulhall share the conviction that an authorial, or perhaps auteurial, presence is necessary. For a film to have philosophical content, there must be someone responsible for orchestrating that content. It is argued here that there are cases, perhaps relatively rare, but Memento being one of them, in which films exhibit philosophical content without relying on auteurial intent to do so, and there are cases, perhaps even rarer, in which films convey the cinematic equivalent of genuinely original philosophical ideas. In the case of Memento, an important distinction is drawn between Aristotelian and Lockean conceptions of personal identity.

U.S. v Windsor and Hollingsworth v Perry Decisions: Supreme Court Conservatives at the Deep End of the Pool

A critical analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage handed down in June, 2013. Although the outcome in Windsor will help advance the cause of marriage equality in the U.S., it is contended here that the opinions themselves, taken jointly, were an incoherent mess, especially from a philosophically conservative judicial standpoint, with regard to the reasoning offered on the question of standing to sue on behalf of the government and the electorate.

A speculative commentary on the legal aspects of the then pending Supreme Court cases on same-sex marriage, focusing in part on the legal history of those two cases, in part on both the political intent, and the legal deficiencies, of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Hollingsworth v Perry (the federal case on California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative to reverse a prior State Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage).

Various queer theorists have contended that some non-queer (or even “inappropriately” queer) observers who offer cultural commentary or artistic visions about queer subjects do so in pursuit of various heteronormative or cissexist agendas. Even though such art or commentary may not be intentionally homophobic or transphobic, it conveys such pejorative messages nonetheless. Those non-queer voices are held to have failed to recognize various implications of what they are articulating, and to know not whereof they speak because, in the absence of lived experience of the relevant queer social reality, they are thought to have no appropriate credentials to issue authoritative observations. Such commentary (or art) is the work of observers that critics might aptly call gender tourists (a term suggested here for the first time).

In terms of gender politics, Transamerica invites the gender tourist charge partly because its portrayal of transgendered identity is socially conservative, tailored to sit comfortably with heteronormative audiences. Bree Osbourne (Felicity Huffman), the film’s central transgendered character, gets portrayed in terms of the “wrong body narrative” associated with the medical profession’s pathologizing of trans identity as an aberrant psychological condition (gender identity disorder or, more recently, gender dysphoria) in need of a “cure” (by means of conforming bodily aesthetics to psychologically-grounded gender identity). As many have observed, the wrong body account of transgendered identity is designed (perhaps unconsciously) to reinforce the gender binary by insisting that there are only two sexes: anyone who feels ambivalent about their own sex/gender identity, the one biologically assigned at birth, is either confused (i.e., in need of restorative therapy), or belongs squarely on the other side of the gender divide, and hence needs hormonal and surgical “fixing”. The idea of sustaining one or more intermediate categories as stable permanent alternatives is, under the wrong body narrative, unthinkable. From this perspective, the postmodern conception of gender as merely performative is not foundationally accurate. While some elements of gender presentation may be culturally specific, gender itself is a naturalized concept closely associated with, but not always identical to, biological sex.

It is argued here that such criticism, while justified with respect to Transamerica’s exclusive reliance on the wrong body metaphor, fails to recognize the extent to which Transamerica transcends the gender colonialism of artistic and academic commentary on gender queer topics that was produced prior to the advent of the anti-gender tourism literature

Catholic and Protestant religious responses to the emergence of the late nineteenth-century concept of a more or less ﬁxed sexual orientation have taken three different directions: some have largely abandoned doctrinal hostility to homosexuality ("Mainline" Protestants, roughly speaking); some have conjoined the belief that homoerotic relationships are sinful with the conviction that homosexuality is a product of malleable individual choice, curable through reparative therapy (Evangelical Protestants, roughly speaking); while others contend that, although still potentially sinful, homoerotic dispositions are typically innate and immutable (chieﬂy the Vatican and other clerical authorities among Roman Catholics). This article offers a theological analysis of the dramatic divergence of opinion between the second and third groups. It is suggested that the differences depend on divergent theological commitments to the disparate accounts of human nature and sexual ethics implicit in Paul, Pelagius, and (more explicitly) Augustine. It is argued that both the Evangelical and Catholic positions on the morality of homoerotic relationships are internally incoherent. The Catholic position on birth control is also implicated in this analysis.

In addition to their official functions, state-sponsored social institutions, such as prisons and civil marriage, serve a more covert function, fostering and sustaining largely unnoticed social ideology. Because such institutions are to some degree coercive, and because the ideology thus promoted is designed to constrain channels of free expression, First Amendment protection is implicated, and can legitimately be applied to the social institution as a whole (not just as it impacts particular individuals). This view is defended through an examination of the ideological implications of the legal landscape governing marriage, as it affects transgendered individuals.

"Filmosophy and the Art of Teaching Philosophy through Film," Film & Philosophy 14 (2010), 135-154.

A critical analysis of Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy (Wallflower Press, 2006) and, more generally, of the question: in what sense do films (at least some films) embody philosophical content, independently of authorial intent? It is argued, using Spike Lee's Jungle Fever as an example, that this phenomenon does occur, but that it is quite rare, because fortuitous in nature.

Constrained immigration policies are potentially very embarrassing for liberals, because they invite a charge of moral hypocrisy. If prosperous states fail to undertake a collective global wealth redistribution policy, then the liberal belief in the principle of moral equality of individuals appears to require that wealthy liberal states do what they can to implement that principle unilaterally, by opening their borders. Consequentialist cosmopolitanism, as defined by Peter Higgins, appears to support that charge of moral hypocrisy. Higgins argues to the contrary: consequentialist cosmopolitanism creates no embarrassment for liberals reluctant to open the immigration floodgates, because the consequentialist argument for doing so is contingent on the cosmopolitan's individualism requirement, and that requirement ignores social realities relevant to a realistic assessment of the social consequences of an open immigration policy. Against this conclusion, it is argued here that Higgins is mistaken in contending that cosmopolitan individualism entails attention to people only in their capacity as the abstract atomic individuals populating Mills' idealized social ontologies. Conversely, it is equally odd for Higgins to suggest that, if cosmopolitan individualism compels us to think of people as abstract atomic individuals, then we also think of them as relatively privileged.

"Brokeback Mountain and The Children's Hour: A Postscript to Vito Russo's Challenge," Film and Philosophy 11 (2007), 139-158.

In The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo argued back in the 1980s that Hollywood traffics in homosexuals only as marketable stereotypes—chiefly as material for fag humor, fag insults, and portrayals as cinematic villains—rather than exploring the distinctive perspectives and problems of individual three-dimensional lesbian, gay, and other sexually unorthodox characters, leading lives that extend beyond the mere fact of their sexuality. The problem, Russo explains, is that economic considerations trump aesthetic or moral ones in Hollywood. This paper reevaluates Russo's claim in light of the relatively substantial recent financial investment in the successful Hollywood film, Brokeback Mountain, using an audience reception comparison with William Wyler's The Children's Hour to assess the legitimacy of Russo's economic critique of the mainstream cinematic critique of gay and lesbian characters.

Under one familiar formulation of the separability thesis – that law cannot necessarily possess moral attributes or value – no serious legal theorist today would accept it. Under another familiar formulation of the separability thesis – that morality need not be a condition of legality – no serious legal theorist today would reject it. Jules Coleman has argued, in consequence, that the separability thesis, rather than identifying the core of Legal Positivism, is fundamentally uninteresting, merely a distraction preventing us from recognizing the really significant core commitments of Legal Positivism. In this paper I argue that once upon a time, there were serious legal theorists who, to some extent at least, rejected the separability thesis, construed in the second way. In its historical context, classical Legal Positivism was indeed distinguishable by its commitment to a particular interpretation of the second version of the separability thesis. Once virtually all legal theorists came to share positivist insights about the proper way to understand the separability thesis, courtesy of H.L.A. Hart, classical Legal Positivism effectively ceased to exist as a distinctive legal theory. The debate has now moved on.

A comparison between the politics of the Orange Order's marches through Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast, Derry, and other Northern Ireland towns, and the SC General Assembly's "compromise" removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol Dome to the State House grounds.

American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Law 96, No.1 (Fall, 1996), 64-71.

A comparative overview of the first modern debate over the possibility and wisdom of trying to legislate morality, the debate in the late 1950s/early 1960s between Patrick Devlin and H.L.A. Hart, and its revival a quarter of a century later by Joel Feinberg (elaborating on Hart's arguments) and Robert George (formulating a more sophisticated version of Devlin's position).

Work in Progress

Film as Philosophy: Alien3 and the Mythology of Auteur-based Philosophical Content

Connie Willis and Kurt Vonnegut on Time Travel, the Block Universe, and Free Will